Presentation from the Post Planetary Capital Symposium

For those of you who were interested but unable to attend the Post Planetary Capital Symposium on Monday, March 24th, at The Center for Transformative Media at Parsons The New School for Design, I have uploaded images of the slides from my presentation and included my notes in the captions. I encourage you to provide feedback or ask questions in the comments below. You may also email me at pickb076@newschool.edu if you would like your feedback to be kept private. Finally, thanks again to my colleagues Berkay Guney and Mateusz Rek for their help and to Ed Keller for giving me the opportunity to present the introduction to our research at the symposium.

Historical development and migration, based on oceanic exploration and shipping, have left us with a legacy of increasingly obsolete port cities...

...and a percentage of the total population that will only increase over time.

Long term projections of global sea level rise show the areas this population calls home permanently under water in the not so distant future....

The eventual relocation of the majority of the world’s population is inevitable.

This mass exodus and resulting development will present many social, cultural, political, economic, environmental, infrastructural, and architectural challenges as well as opportunities. – Opportunities which will take 100 years or more to implement, preceded by decades or more of research, policy, and planning. Serious foundations for this must be implemented within our lifetimes if we are to not only avoid catastrophe but seize the inherent opportunities of the situation. - Our research centers around three main areas of inquiry:

...the future of existing cities...

...the emergence of new metropolitan hubs...

... and the resultant and necessary network of the future megalopolis, along with the implications each of these may have, and opportunities these present...

...for the surrounding landscape. - A few of the jumping points and questions arising from our initial research include:

Space ports will become the economic, political, and physical nuclei of the new regional and global networks.

Dependent on certain reliable weather conditions and sky access, the optimized development of space ports is limited to specific bands of latitude encompassing what are predominantly remote and inhospitable territories...

...shifting the global centers of economic and political power, a restructuring of both the physical and political landscape as well as raising issues regarding...

...the construction of sustainable megacities within this context of extreme heat, water scarcity, and a lack of fertile land.

Further, we ask what are the broader implications of this relocated and consolidated, ie post-sprawl, population in regards to the potential futures of the interconnected and surrounding landscape in terms of agriculture...

...or a return to nature? - What we are looking for, or trying to get at here, is the impact our transition into a post-planetary society may have on our home planet and draw attention to the near future context, relationships, and dynamics and the importance, or necessity even, of global cooperation to successfully usher our species into this potential future – which may not only be post-planetary but also post capitalist. - With these things in mind, it is interesting to think about the fact that...

...The economic and political center of our post-planetary society may be Sierra County, New Mexico.

**UPDATE: You can now watch the video of my presentation (jump to the 3min mark), followed by a presentation by Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG / Gizmodo) about several issues arising from both literal post-planetary society and a metaphorical loss of terrestrial reference, below. You can also see this video along with all the presentations from the Post Planetary Capital Symposium on Ustream.

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